Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Blythe is beside me. I didn’t hear her arrive.
“Anton Almazov,” she tells me, and her voice has the same careful neutrality from the billing-code conversation, except now it’s laced with something drier. “Ace Royale casino. Biggest client Keyes has ever landed. His family owns half the waterfront.”
I’m still facing the conference room doors. Through the glass, I can see the shape of him, dark suit against the white chairs, and Kaye across the table, and his hand lifting in a gesture that is fluid and easy and sends something through my chest that I have no yellow tab for.
“Daisy.”
I turn.
Blythe is assessing me like she assessed my pre-cut tabs: with the faint surprise of someone who expected something predictable and got something she’s still deciding how to categorise.
“You’re doing the thing,” she tells me.
“What thing?”
“The thing where a girl from Idaho stands in a marble lobby with a colour-tabbed file and forgets how to blink because a man in a dark suit has grey eyes.” She picks a piece of lint off my jacket. “Don’t do the thing.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
“He’s a client,” I manage.
Blythe’s expression does something complicated. “Yes,” she agrees. “He is.”
She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t need to. Her turn back toward our desks carries the weight of something she has decided not to tell me, and I stand there in the lobby with my Marchetti file and my sensible flats and the ghost of a grey-eyed glance still burning a hole in my peripheral vision, and I think: Tab it blue, Daisy.
I go back to my desk. I file. I tab. I do not think about grey eyes or smiles that don’t connect or how he glanced back like he was making a note of me in a system I can’t see.
Just before five, my desk phone rings.
“Fletch. My office, please.”
Kaye is standing behind her desk when I come in. The harbour is behind her, all blue and gold, and the late-afternoon light makes her hair glow like a halo, and she is smiling at me with an expression I will remember for a long time.
Pride. Like I’ve done something right. Like this is the beginning of everything she brought me here for.
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
I sit.
“Mr. Almazov has requested you be assigned to his account.”
The harbour burns behind her. The world tilts. And something in my chest, something I don’t have a tab for yet, something that is neither red nor blue nor green nor yellow, catches.
Chapter 2
DAISY
I’ve colour-tabbed the file three times.
Red for litigation. Blue for compliance. Green for correspondence. Yellow for the two clauses in the retainer agreement that don’t match the billing code but that Blythe told me to stop asking about. I’ve squared the spine, aligned the tabs so they cascade down the right edge in exact quarter-inch intervals, and clipped a summary sheet to the inside cover with the client name, account number, and a timeline of key dates that nobody asked me to prepare but that felt necessary.
The file is immaculate. I am not.
Conference room three has glass walls. I can see Kaye at the far end of the corridor, walking toward me with a coffee in one hand and a smile that says this is the beginning of everything I brought you here for, and behind her, through two more panes of glass and the width of the lobby, Anton Almazov is signing in at reception, and even from this distance I can tell that his suit today is charcoal, not black, and his tie is a deep, burnt blue, and I shouldn’t know these things already but I do.
I’ve been in this conference room a while.
The table is long, white, polished to a shine that reflects the overhead lights in two strips. I’m in the chair closest to the door because it felt presumptuous to sit at the centre, and because if I need to leave, the exit is within reach. I don’t know why I’m calculating exits. I’m a paralegal in a conference room with a colour-tabbed file. This is what I trained for. This is why Kaye brought me to Monaco.
The door opens.
Kaye comes in first. “Daisy, you remember Mr. Almazov.”
He’s behind her. He fills the doorframe like a man in a foreign film I used to rent from the Boise public library, and the comparison is so absurd that a tiny, hysterical part of my brain tries to laugh and the rest of my brain shuts it down with force.
“Miss Fletcher.”
His voice. I wasn’t prepared for his voice. On Friday he didn’t speak to me, not directly, and I’d built a version of it in my head over the weekend that was deep and clipped and European and impersonal. The real version is warm. Lower than I expected. There’s an accent that isn’t French and isn’t quite Russian, and it sits on the consonants like candlelight on the edge of a glass.